1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method and system for organizing and managing bookmarks to browsed pages of information.
2. Related Art
The Internet has made available to a computer user millions of pages of information in a server-client architecture in which the computer user's computer is the client and a remote computer is the server. The server is typically made available to the Internet client through an interface called an Internet Service Provider (e.g., America On-Line, Prodigy, CompuServe, etc.) which communicates with the user over a communications medium such as telephone lines, cable, etc. The Internet Service Provider functions as a conduit through which the client communicates with many different servers. In order for the server and the client to communicate, the client computer includes a computer program called a “browser” (e.g., Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, etc.). The browser communicates the client's request to a server and formats the responses from the server for browsing (i.e., viewing) by the user.
The server receives a request for information from the client, processes the request, and returns the requested information to the client. The information returned from the server to the client is an image of “page” or a “Web page.” A page is identified by a web address called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) which may be very lengthy. An example of a URL is “http://www-1.ibm.com/businesscenter/us/smbusapub.nsf/detailcontacts/SBCenter59BB”. With current technology, a user may access many pages over brief periods of time. For example, it is not uncommon for a user to access 20 pages or more in 1 or 2 minutes. Because a URL is awkward for a user to remember and enter, the browser may include a “bookmark” or “favorites” capability of allowing a user to save a URL of a page while the user is visiting the page. The URL or page thus saved is called a “bookmark.” However, the user may generate many such bookmarks and is thus faced with a need to organize and manage the bookmarks so generated.
An Internet user may be interested in linking to particular Internet web sites only when the web site pages includes certain desired information. These pages are often bookmarked so that the user can access these pages frequently to determine if the desired information is present on these pages. For example, some users will view a financial page only if one of several stocks they hold is being discussed; otherwise these users have no interest in these pages. Checking all pages of this type can be a long process and often pages of interest are missed because of the long time that it takes for the user to load the pages and read the pages. Accordingly, there is a need a method and system for organizing and managing bookmarks of URL's (or pages) that have been saved.